Immigration Debate Omits Key Issue: Immigrants

With a nudge from President Bush, Washington is about to begin a long-overdue debate on immigration policy. It might be a good time to also reconsider our policies toward immigrants.

What’s the difference? Immigration policy focuses on who should be allowed to enter, and remain, in the United States. Immigrant policy looks at what it takes to help them adjust and succeed once they arrive. The debate over immigration policy is accelerating at warp speed, with Bush and Democrats now competing to detail plans that could legalize millions of undocumented workers from Mexico and other countries. In contrast, there’s been little discussion about what programs might help assimilate those workers or, even more important, the millions of legal immigrants already here.

That’s inexplicable. During the melting-pot era a century ago, the Progressive movement recognized the importance of helping the huddled masses enter the American mainstream; it responded with the fabled Settlement Houses and voluntary societies that encouraged assimilation. Now, even before any new guest worker program that Bush unveils, America is in the midst of the largest surge of immigration since those days. Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans were born abroad, the highest share in 70 years. Yet we have failed to replicate those earlier institutions for binding new arrivals to the larger society. “There is not one person in Washington who is charged with how immigrants are faring once they get here,” complains Margie McHugh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition.

The approaching debate over legalization and guest workers offers an opportunity to fill this gap; it’s an appropriate moment to examine the needs of both immigrants who arrived here legally and those that might be allowed to move from illegal to legal status. A serious look at what new arrivals need to succeed would focus on several issues. Key among them:

Access to English instruction: Nothing better predicts economic success for immigrants than command of the English language. Yet the demand for English instruction far outstrips the supply. Recently, an Urban Institute survey found that nearly half of immigrant adults in New York and Los Angeles had only limited English proficiency. But funding for adult English language instruction is meager; a study by McHugh’s group found that English courses were available for only about 5% of immigrants in New York who wanted to pursue them. Expanding English instruction must be “the cornerstone of any immigrant policy,” insists Michael Fix, the Urban Institute’s director of immigration studies.

This year, Washington has been moving in the wrong direction, with Bush proposing to cut a new fund that former President Clinton established for English classes aimed specifically at immigrants. But the debate over illegal immigrants might offer a bank-shot opportunity to meet this need. In 1986, the last time Congress legalized a significant number of illegal immigrants, it addressed conservative fears that they would not assimilate by requiring them to take English classes. Most immigrant advocates would probably welcome an English-study requirement in any legalization program today--so long as Washington helped provide the classes. And it would hardly make sense to offer language instruction to formerly illegal immigrants while denying it to the legal immigrants already waiting for it today.

Access to public benefits: Legalization supporters react like a vampire to the cross at the suggestion that the coming debate might be a good time to reexamine the availability of social welfare benefits for recent immigrants. Their understandable fear is that opponents will try to derail any legalization plan by raising the specter of welfare checks for illegal immigrants.

Here’s an early bet: Any legalization plan Congress ultimately approves will deny social welfare benefits to workers while they are transitioning from illegal to legal status. Two big precedents virtually guarantee that outcome. In the 1986 amnesty, Congress barred the formerly illegal from receiving public benefits for five years. Then the welfare reform bill in 1996 also put a five-year ban on social benefits (like welfare, food stamps and health care) for all newly arriving legal immigrants. Congress isn’t going to provide benefits for illegal immigrants that it’s denied to immigrants who followed the rules.

But the legalization debate should at least open a discussion about whether it still makes sense to deny all social welfare benefits to new immigrants. It’s understandable that Congress doesn’t want to provide new arrivals with welfare--if not particularly relevant, since almost all immigrants come here to work. But many end up in low-wage jobs. And it’s more difficult to justify denying them access to programs meant to make work pay, like food stamps or a program that provides health care for children of the working poor. In fact, hard-working, tax-paying new arrivals personify the families those programs are intended to help.

Access to citizenship: In the long run, America is best served if all immigrants are fully integrated into society by becoming U.S. citizens with the right to vote. Yet naturalization has become a surprisingly unnatural act; today less than 40% of American residents born abroad have become citizens. Fifty years ago, the percentage was double that.

Bush, commendably, has shown interest in encouraging more naturalization; he recently asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to slash the delay for processing citizenship applications to six months. That’s a good start, but truly encouraging more citizenship would also require more funding for English language classes and more outreach programs encouraging eligible immigrants to apply.

When Clinton launched such an outreach program, congressional Republicans ferociously attacked it as an effort to mint Democratic voters for the 1996 election. Bush has repeatedly denounced the defeatist view that Republicans can’t compete for votes among immigrants, especially Latinos. Encouraging more citizenship, and the new voters it entails, might be the best way for the president to prove he views the newest Americans as a political opportunity--and not the threat that some in his party see.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.